How to give a black-and-white photo color

There are many tutorials out there that show you how to adjust the coloration of photos, but I've found too many that talk about using curves instead of other adjustments. Although using curves is a great way to fix up your photos, it can be confusing and time consuming. In this tutorial, we're going to look at a quick and easy way to give a black-and-white photo color using adjustment layers in Photoshop CS4.

First, open Photoshop and click File then Open and navigate to the folder where you've saved your picture. In this tutorial, the entire picture is one color, so it's best to practice on a photo of one object. Once you've opened your photo, right click the background layer in the Layers panel (on the right side of the workspace) and click Layer from Background.



In order to add an adjustment layer, click on Layer then New Adjustment Layer then Hue/Saturation. We want to start to add a bit of color to it (hue) and adjust how much of that color shows up (saturation).



Using the sliders on the right side of the screen in the Adjustments panel, change the values until you have hints of a color close to the color you want the object to be. In this case, since I want my color to be brown, I've moved the slider until hints of yellow have appeared (the hue is set to +30). I've also adjusted the saturation to make it more visible (saturation is set to +50).



Now we need to add a fill color layer so we can add more color to the photo. To do this, click on Layer then New Fill Layer then Solid Color.



Choose the color you want your object to be; in this case, I want my object to be brown. I've opened a picture of wood in another Photoshop tab and used the eyedropper tool to choose a sample of the color. Then I went back to my other document and double clicked the color swatch on the Color Fill layer and used the eyedropper tool to click on the foreground color swatch in the Tools panel.



After I've changed the color, I went to the top of the Layers panel and clicked on the arrow beside the opacity drop down to bring up the slider. You can use the slider or type in the text area to change the value (I've made mine 30% so we can see the wood texture beneath it yet still have some color).



Because we had to lower the opacity, the photo looks kind of faded and washed out. In order to give it a richer contrast and look more lifelike, we need to fix up the contrast. To do this, we need another adjustment layer, so click Layer then New Adjustment Layer then Brightness/Contrast.



Finally, move the sliders for Brightness and Contrast until you're satisfied. I moved mine way down in order to make the color darker and bring out the details more. I changed my Brightness slider to -60 and my Contrast slider to -60 as well.



And there you have it – a colorful, realistic looking edit of a black-and-white picture. Although you might think you could do the same with just a color fill layer over the black-and-white photo or a color overlay using layer styles, it wouldn't give it as much definition or as realistic of an outcome. When adjusting color, it's best to adjust contrast and saturation as well to give it the best look possible.

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